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Truscott is Getting GREENER
This site is helped by an inspirational book called Going Green: A Kid's Guide to Saving the Planet. Written by John Elkington, Julia Hailes, Douglas Hill, and Joel Makower and illustrated by Tony Ross, this guide was published by Puffin Books in 1990. Going Green is no longer in print.
Truscott is going GREEN by:
Providing trash and recycle containers in every room
Promoting FUEL FREE FRIDAYS - walk, ride or car pools to school
Separating trash from recyclables in the Lunch room
Turning off the lights in empty rooms.
Help Truscott go GREEN when you:
* Sign up for the monthly newsletter online.
* Sign up for a carpool with your neighbors
* Recycle onsite - Plastic shopping bags
old ink cartridges, old cell phones
*
Guess what...almost every year, each American family throws out:
2,460 pounds of paper
540 pounds of metals
480 pounds of glass
480 pounds of food scraps
All told, each of us throws away more than 1,200 pounds of trash per year, farm more than people in most other countries. About 80 percent of that garbage ends up in landfills or dumps. One big problem is that we are running out of landfill space--almost half of the nation's landfills will be full within ten years.
The real tragedy behind the mountains of trash we produce is that a lot of what we throw away can be reused or recycled. Not everything is recyclable, and some materials are more easily recycled than others. After all, why throw away what we can reuse?
What exactly can be recycled? Almost anything:
- Metals--such as aluminum, steel, and tin. All of these metals must be mined from the ground, which can damage the local landscape and create water and air pollution. Most metals can be melted down and recycled again and again. This saves huge amounts of energy.
- Glass--is made largely from sand, and there is hardly a shortage of that in the world. However, turning the sand into glass takes a large amount of energy. Much less energy (and much less sand) is used when glass is melted down and made into new bottles and jars. Every ton of crushed waste glass used saved the equivalent of about 30 gallons of oil.
- Paper--is made from trees, of course, and cutting down trees can cause environmental problems. In the United States we cut down more than 4 billion trees a year to make paper and cardboard for newspapers, magazines, packaging, junk mail, kitchen towels, toilet paper, boxes. It takes at least 25 years for a tree to grow tall enough to be made into paper--which we may use and throw away in a matter of minutes!
- Plastics--are made from chemicals, many of which are made of fossil fuels such as oil. Because the technology has not been perfected, very little plastic is being recycled in the United States. And recycling plastic is different from recycling glass, aluminum, and paper. While you can turn used paper into new paper, and turn an aluminum can or glass bottle into another can or bottle, you cannot turn a plastic hamburger container into another container. At best, the container can be made into something different--a flowerpot, for example, or a videocassette box--so there are limits to the usefulness of recycling plastic.
- Other materials--this includes a variety of products that we can use every day, such as batteries (including automobile batteries), clothing, oil, tires, and yard wastes. Check out the rest of this site for specific suggestions on how to recycle some of these things.
What can't be recycled? In general, it isn't possible to recycle things made out of several different kinds of material---several kinds of plastics, for example, or metals mixed with plastic or paper.
You probably already know about the "three Rs"--reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic. But there are three more Rs you should know:
- Reduce the amount of packaing used.
- Reuse whatever you can. And buy products made of or packaged in reused (recycled) material.
- Recycle as much as you can. This allows us to get the most use of out of our precious resources.
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